Dear So to Speak readers, 

I’m humbled and honored to share this Summer 2024 issue with y’all, and to be anointed à la the wonderful, strange, sexy, innovative, eccentric, queer, provocative work that we are so proud, again and again, to feature. Our contributors’ trust means everything to us; your trust means everything to us. Thank you for reading.

I’ll be transparent: this was a challenging year for our staff, an even more harrowing year for the world. There were so many accomplishments at So to Speak this past year worth celebrating, this issue among them, but this space feels wasted if not to call out the atrocities ongoing at the time of this writing.

Since October, we’ve seen relentless genocidal violence enacted against Palestinians in Gaza, robbing more than 35,000 people of their livelihoods, their freedom; Congolese Tutsis (the Banyamulenge and Hema) and the Batwa people are being systematically displaced, starved, and killed; daily, Sudanese civilians in the Darfur are bombarded by militias, raped, killed, and left to waste without food or water. The U.S. government and its Western allies continue to fund these genocides with money and ammunition, the words spared by the Biden administration about Gaza barely ranging between milquetoast and dismissive, and of the violence in Congo and Sudan they say almost nothing.

The least we could do, then, as a small independent journal with a commitment to intersectionality, was shout as loud as possible about this violence. This is what brought about the NO PRIDE WITHOUT PALESTINE event with The Offing and phoebe, the announcement itself broadcasted simultaneously with the release of this digital issue. This is our collective declaration, with more than just words: we see you, we stand with you, we are here to help.

The release of these Summer issues are often concurrent with Pride Month, and I beseech anyone reading this to remember that the first Pride was a riot, that queer pride itself is nothing without liberation. There is no pride to be celebrated until we are all liberated, all of us, everywhere—free from the inherent violence of the settler-colonialist project poisoning every continent.

Until then, we do what we can. We make art; we hold our loved ones close; we speak with the voices that the media chooses to erase until, together, we are impossible to ignore. And you, reader: you are here. I hope this issue feels to you like an invitation, an extended hand you might join with your own. I hope you come walk with us awhile, into a brighter future.

In solidarity,

Jessika Bouvier

Editor-In-Chief